ORINDA (KRON) – Orinda City Councilman Steve Glazer is trying get support for his petition to push for a law banning transit strikes.

He showed up at the Lafayette BART station to hand out fliers to commuters.

Glazer told KRON 4’s Jeff Pierce that he was there to encourage people to sign an online petition to stop public transit agencies from going on strike.

“The evidence is in that the consequences of a strike are enormous for the bay area. Our economy, the four hundred thousand people that use BART everyday, keeping cars off the road and all those environmental impacts of having all those cars. The consequences are huge,” he says.

According to a release issued by Glazer, BART carries nearly 375,000 passengers on an average week day. The Bay Area Council Economic Institute estimates that one day of a BART strikes cost the Bay Area economy $73 million. It also hurts our environment, wasting 800,000 gallons of gas each day of a strike and putting 16 million lbs of carbon into the air.

Glazer’s statement says that New York, Chicago, Massachusetts, Washington, and San Francisco restrict transit strikes. Due to the crippling impact a BART strike would have on the Bay Area and California economy, it is imperative that the State Legislature provide a backstop to the regional BART Board through a ban on BART strikes.

Petition:
We, the undersigned, support state legislation to prohibit public transit workers, including BART, from striking.